Sideways or very slowly rising is by far the best for...

Sideways or very slowly rising is by far the best for specs.

Specs do well with "speculative buying".

When the market is volatile/negative specs get dumped and nobody wants them.

When the market is rising quickly who would take the risk with specs when the can make big money range trading blue chips with very little risk.

When the market is flat there is no money to be made in blue chips and the interest, and hence the wild rides upwards occur on the specs.

An interesting point is that recently discussed in "the daily reckoning" - that coming out of the last bear market the mid-caps outperformed the blues 2 to 1, and the specs outperformed the midcaps 2 to 1 (and blues 4 to 1).

If you can find good quality specs pushing towards being mid-caps there is big money to be made as the bear market fades out and the next bull market kicks in. The issue is when this will happen. The market has stabilised and started recovering twice so far only to be hit by more bad news and be slaughtered again.

The market seems to be settling down now and may start recovering again about now, though it will be more wary this time for the next big crisis to hit. Maybe the terrorists are getting low on cash now six years out from their massive shorting profits on 911 and will launch another major strike in the US again soon. (Hopefully the useless FBI will be examining the futures markets and short positions more closely to look for a flood of shorts from the middle east this time.) Hopefully the next fall is for another reason - one that won't cost hundreds of thousands of lives from the next Yank retaliatory war.